Information is collected and presented to people in many different ways. Written text, in the form of books, newspapers, and magazines, represent one conventional way of presenting readers with information. Electronically, the written text, in the form of text data, may be presented to people over a computer or other similar device. For example, people may access a web site that provides news and other textual information, along with information in other media formats, such as pictures and other images.
Another way in which information is presented to people is via a presentation, in which a person communicates such information to a person or group of persons. To assist the presenter in communicating such information, conventionally an overhead projector is used to display a sequence of transparent slides, with each slide typically consisting of text and/or some graphical image.
With computers gaining in terms of popularity, such presentations are often carried out through the use of a computer running appropriate software. One example of such software is PowerPoint™ available from Microsoft Corporation. As is well known in the art, PowerPoint™ creates a series of screen slides that typically include written text, and that may include a graphical image or the like. The screens are arranged in some order as dictated by the author. During presentation, the screens are displayed, with the progression from one screen to another being controlled by the presenter, or alternatively being performed automatically by the software.
While such software provides significant benefits and advantages, there are still disadvantages associated therewith. For example, in a conventional presentation, the author must bring the presentation, run PowerPoint™, and carry out the presentation. There is no provision for on-demand sharing of the presentation. In addition, such software makes it cumbersome and restrictive to record audio clips for the respective slides.
Moreover, in a conventional PowerPoint™ presentation, if there are associated sound files, the presentation becomes excessively large, thereby making it difficult to share PowerPoint™ files that include audio clips for one or more of the screen slides. In addition, if an author of a PowerPoint™ presentation wishes to share the presentation with recipients, those recipients must have either PowerPoint™ or PowerPoint™ Viewer software on their machines in order to view the presentation.
Thus, it would be desirable to have a system and method that facilitate the creation of a multi-media presentation, and that provide an efficient means for a recipient to navigate through the presentation to find desired subject matter. In addition, it would be desirable to have such a system and method that allow an author to record audio clips in an improved manner. Moreover, it would be desirable to create presentations that are compact in electronic file size to facilitate sharing the presentations. And, it would be desirable to have a system that creates a packaged, executable presentation that can be viewed via a conventional web browser, without the need for any additional software. The need also exists to distribute the presentation over a communications network in a streaming media format, thereby mitigating the need for the recipient to download the entire presentation before beginning to view it. The present invention addresses one or more of these desirable features.